Rangers Wait for Stepan to Step Up

By

Mike Sielski

Updated April 21, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

Everything was bound to get harder for Derek Stepan anyway. How could it not? Score three goals in your first NHL game—as Stepan, a rookie forward for the Rangers, did on Oct. 9 in Buffalo—and you attract attention to a degree that would make Lady Gaga jealous.

A hat trick in his inaugural NHL appearance? Before Stepan accomplished the feat, such a thing had happened only three times in league history and only twice in the previous 60 years.

Stepan didn't keep up his 246-goal pace. It would have been ridiculous, of course, to expect him to. But for a 20-year-old rookie, Stepan had a good go of it during the regular season, scoring 21 goals (the fourth-most on the team) and playing in all 82 of the Rangers' games.

But there was one rite of passage that neither he nor any first-year player can really prepare for: his first postseason series. And to say everything has gotten harder for Stepan in the Eastern Conference quarterfinals against the Capitals would be charitable.

Entering Wednesday night's Game 4 at Madison Square Garden, Stepan's initiation to playoff hockey had been a rough one. He had not scored a goal or collected an assist. He had managed only two shots. He was a minus-3, meaning that the Capitals had scored three more goals than the Rangers had while he was on the ice.

So lost has Stepan seemed at times that Rangers coach John Tortorella said before Game 4 that he would move Stepan from his natural position of center to right wing.

The maneuver was not without precedent. Stepan had played wing a bit during his three-year career at the University of Wisconsin, and Tortorella shifted him there a few times during the season with some success.

"Funny story is that, the first three times he did it, I scored a goal within the first two shifts," said Stepan, whom the Rangers selected in the second round of the 2008 NHL draft. "Then he said something and jinxed it, and then I started overthinking."

And there really isn't time for overthinking in the playoffs. The expectation for every player is that he will finish every check and drop to the ice without hesitation to block any shot, and every arena—yes, Coach Boudreau, even Madison Square Garden—feels like hell with the lid still on.

"That's just the way it is," Tortorella said. "This is the stage where you have to keep on getting better. If you don't, you're done."

Rangers defenseman Bryan McCabe, for instance, didn't play his first postseason game until he had six full years in the league under his belt. Even those half-dozen seasons of NHL experience, he said, hadn't prepared him for what a single postseason game demands of a player mentally and physically.

"It's a totally different beast: the intensity, the focus, the toll it takes on your body," said McCabe, who's in his 15th NHL season and made his playoff debut for Toronto in 2001.

These are lessons that Stepan needed to learn and is still learning.

"In December, I was so used to doing this, that and the other thing," he said. "I was kind of on cloud nine....It's definitely different now. I've said it a couple of times, every single play is important. You have to have a mindset that everything is a 45-second shift, and you need to be sharp for all 45."

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